1. Here’s the subject guide for your program or course
Here’s the subject guide for your program or course. If you don’t know how to find this page, look at the tutorial, Using the UST Library.
On the first page is listed all the topics included on this subject guide.
I have chosen the most helpful databases we have for your field. Click on Finding Articles to see what they are.

2. For Public Safety and Law Enforcement Leadership, Criminal Justice Abstracts will probably be the most helpful to you.
Most databases cover journals in a particular field, so each database covers a different set of journals. Some databases, like Academic Search Premier, cover all fields, but no one field that deeply.
Under the title of each of the other suggested databases , I have listed different topics or subjects that the databases cover.
Now, let’s click on Criminal Justice Abstracts.

3. Deciding which search terms to use is very important
Deciding which search terms to use is very important. Each database uses language differently. Many databases guide you to your terms with their thesaurus, subject terms, or finding terms page. Criminal Justice Abstracts doesn’t do this.

4. For our example topic, let’s look at how stress on the job affects a police officer’s family life. First we want to break down the topic into parts so we can translate it into computer thought.
So we have police, stress and families.

5. law enforcement cops police
Police might be represented by several English terms. We can join them together with OR to find articles that any one of these terms.
law enforcement OR police OR cops We’ll find any articles that use any of these terms

6. We’ll just use “stress” for stress.
Articles might use the words “ family” or “families”. We can type in the parts of the words that are the same, famil, and use a symbol, an asterisk, for the parts of the words that are different. So we get famil*

7. Let’s put these terms into the boxes in Criminal Justice Abstracts

8. Let’s use some of the advanced options.
We’ll choose boolean searching (that’s what the OR and AND mean).
Criminal Justice Abstracts will find words that are related or are synonyms to those you’ve chosen. We’ll tell it to do that.
Your professors will probably want you to use peer reviewed articles. So let’s choose that option.
And we’ll limit this to just the past 10 years, since life was different before then.
Then click on search.

9. What kind of information do you have when you get to this point
What kind of information do you have when you get to this point? You can see when the article was published, how long the article is (most research articles will be pages long), if there is a link to download the article, as well as other keywords that may be helpful to explore.
We’ll look at the Roll Call article first, because it has a pdf icon, which means it’s full text in the database and it’ll be easy for us to get.

10. Here’s the abstract of the article
Here’s the abstract of the article. Read it first to see if it has anything to do with your topic. It does! Click on the pdf on the left hand side of the page to download and read the article.
On the right hand side are options to print what you see here and to send information about the article to your own collection of articles in RefWorks, EndNote or Zotero. If you’d like to learn more about RefWorks, click on the tab in your Subject Guide that says Citing Sources.

11. Here’s your article!

12. If you find a great article, but there is not a pdf link, just click on the GET IT! Button to the left of the article. It will look through all the journals and databases we subscribe to and see if another database has it or if we have it in print.
And read abstracts. This one gives us some more keywords to use: work-family conflict, spillover

13. Sometimes we don’t have the article online
Sometimes we don’t have the article online. In that case, click on the InterLibrary Loan link and ask the library to borrow the article from another library. This is really quick now. It should take under 4 or 5 business days (usually much less). If we only have the article in print, you can use this link to ask the library to scan it for you and send you a link to the scan.